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Ethnographic writing is its own species of writing, and has come under critical scrutiny in recent decades for its capacity to mislead and misrepresent people. How you write about people is as important as what you say about them, and it is possible to offend the people you are writing about, or to give the wrong impression about them, by using inappropriate vocabulary or phrasing. This is a topic that you should discuss at length with your instructor; here I will simply point out a few cautions to bear in mind when presenting your data.

Anthropologists have been sensitive for some time to the fact that groups of people are commonly identified in multiple ways – the term(s) that outsiders use to name them, and the term(s) they use to name themselves. “Eskimo,” for example, is an outsider term, whereas “Inuit” (and variants) is an insider term. In reasonably straightforward cases, anthropologists opt for using the insider term. But things are not always straightforward. Take the case of people from predominantly Spanish-speaking countries in North, Central, and South America (and the Caribbean) living in the United States. What do you call them as a group? Are they a definable group? Do they have an insider term?

The problem with finding a term for Spanish-speaking peoples from the Americas living in the United States is that this is a multicultural demographic when viewed from the inside, but homogeneous when considered by outsiders. Any single term that identifies them as a group is going to entail treating them with some sense of unity as an “other” group (other than dominant, white, US culture). That is, the supposed unity of the group exists only in the minds of outsiders. It is common to hear Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States being called “Mexicans” regardless of their country of origin, and in this case “Mexican” is often used as a derogatory term. The desire for such people to adopt a collective term for themselves is an overt admission that they form a group in the eyes of an oppressing class and that they need a collective term to use in their struggle to fight back against oppression.

The problem with finding a collective term is that every one of them carries negative connotations for some or all of the people. “La Raza” had a currency for decades – originating in political struggles in Mexico in the 1920s. The problem is that “raza” is a loaded, potentially racial/racist, term that has, among other things, the implication not just of being non-white, but of being actively anti-white. In Argentina we have a specific classification, “rubio/a,” meaning something like the English term “white” and includes a substantial percentage of the population in urban areas. Rubios of Argentine origin (myself included) have major issues with being lumped into the general category of La Raza (which defaults in our minds to what we call “moreno/a” (brown) or “mestizo/a” (mixed) – also heavily loaded terms). In the 1960s, “Chicano” had widespread popularity among some groups but not with others. It had originally been a derogatory outsider term, but, as is quite common with such slurs, was picked up by insiders and used as a badge of honor. In turn, “Hispano/a,” “Latino/a,” etc. have all been adopted and discarded.

One of the additional problems with Spanish is that many words have genders. The suffix “-o” is typically masculine, and the suffix -a is feminine When you have an unidentified group of people who could be male or female or both, the traditional linguistic convention has been to use the masculine plural. This usage is now changing. For example, “Latino/a” where gender is unclear or generic, or, more commonly nowadays, “Latinx” where the “x” indicates an undefined gender. In English, similar problems have been addressed in an analogous manner. At one time, the correct usage would have been to default to the masculine for pronouns, as in the sentence, “When a doctor is unsure of a diagnosis, he will …” Nowadays there are two choices to replace “he” in that sentence: one being the composite “s/he” (or he/she) and the other being to use the plural “they” – which is becoming more common usage. Gendered terms for occupations, such as “actress,” “poetess,” and “sculptress,” have all but disappeared from contemporary discourse.

There are numerous adjectives and nouns in common use in English that can be classified as dead metaphors (that is, words that carry metaphorical meanings either etymologically or historically, but no longer do so in contemporary speech) which can be culturally offensive even though their historic meanings have long since passed away. Anthropologists try to err on the side of caution in this regard. Take, for example, the old British slang word “clodhopper” (sometimes shortened to “clod”) meaning someone who is either physically or mentally clumsy. A “clod” refers to a lump of dirt such as you would find on a farm or in rural areas, so a clodhopper, that is, someone who has to hop over clods of dirt, is a farmer or rural person in general, implying that a clumsy person is like a (stupid) farmer. The word “clown” has exactly the same history. In the sixteenth century it was a term for a rustic or peasant, shifting in meaning over time to mean anyone whose actions were foolish. Where can we draw the line? Is it acceptable to call an argument “myopic” when the term refers specifically to a visual impairment? Probably not, even though the word is in common usage. Caution is always needed.

Terms such as “philistine,” which are derived from ethnic slurs, raise the issue of how to refer to ethnic and geographic designations. It is impossible to refer neutrally to the region of the world that was once the homeland of a group of Semitic peoples that became known Biblically as the Israelites, because any term you use for the region as a whole – Palestine, Israel, Canaan, Levant, et al. – will offend someone. Political designations have shifted over time, but whichever one you choose, it is a hegemonic label and, therefore, problematic. By that same token, “American” as an adjective for people and things that originate in the United States is offensive to me as it is to many people from Argentina, and much of South and Central America as a whole. Aren’t we Americans? In Spanish we use the term “estadounidense” (person or thing from the United States) or, more generally, “norteamericano” (North American) as adjectives in place of “americano” (American) which is too broad. But if you were born and raised in the United States you probably use “American” as a self-designation without thinking. The American Anthropological Association does. It can be challenging, but eye-opening, to examine your language usage critically.

Even terms that were at one time in common usage in anthropology, such as “tribe,” have come under suspicion even though they may have insider approval (as in parts of the first nations of the United States). Such terms tend to get lumped into the category of colonialist terminology, and are, indeed, vague when applied indiscriminately. But sometimes the alternate choices are either confusing or unhelpful. Take, for example, the adjective “indigenous.” It comes from Latin and its original meaning was “born in (a place),” but this meaning has been supplanted by a meaning of “original peoples” (synonymous with “aborigine” – that is, “ab origine” meaning “from the beginning”). In contemporary usage, however, “indigenous” is generally used to mean “the people who were living in a place when European colonists arrived.” You cannot legitimately refer to the Lenape as the original inhabitants of New York or the Inca as the original inhabitants of Peru. Peoples came and went continuously before Europeans arrived. But, the arrival of European colonists in a region put a timestamp on who was there when they arrived. Thus, even “indigenous” is a colonial term (meaning “descendants of people who were here at the time that the first colonists arrived”). There is no clear solution, but it is common in ethnographic writing nowadays to designate a group using the term for them that they use in their local language for themselves. Thus, for example, “Navajo” was the name given by Spanish missionaries to a group of people living in North America. They refer to themselves as Diné (“the people”), which is how anthropologists typically refer to them now.

At one time, anthropologists were in the habit of using the term “informant” to describe a person giving information to the ethnographer. The term has a rather dark undertone, as in “police informant,” but its more general usage in anthropology has habitually been less sinister: an informant “informs’’ the fieldworker, but thereby implies a certain kind of distance between speaker and listener. Because of the negative connotations of the term, contemporary anthropologists are more inclined to work with either more neutral or more indicative (and inclusive) terms such as “participant,” “interlocutor,” “partner,” or “interviewee.” Sometimes, however, using “informant” is the generic choice that fits best. Not all fieldwork situations are partnerships or symmetrical relationships by any means, and it can be misleading to represent them with vocabulary suggesting that they are.

Likewise, I am mindful that even the “field” and “fieldwork” can be loaded terms. When you interview someone in his/her home, are you “in the field”? Yes and no. The “field,” once conceived of as an “other” place where the “other” were studied, is now no longer a viable term, and certainly not when it comes to the projects in this book which are likely going to be conducted in situations with which you are reasonably familiar (even though some components will necessarily be new to you). The term “fieldwork” is somewhat less troublesome. Fieldwork is the process of gathering ethnographic data. Doing fieldwork has more to do with a certain mindset rather than with the people or places involved. That mindset has different facets, but it is always more than simply looking on or even “being there” as fieldwork is sometimes described (Watson 1999; Bradburd 1998).

Even if you go to live in a country that is alien to you, for a year or more, so that you are forced to learn a new language, meet new people, engage in forms of daily life that are foreign to you, and participate in strange customs, you are not necessarily doing fieldwork – even though some of the behaviors overlap. If you move to a strange location, your primary interest in learning about the place is likely to be pragmatic – where to live, how to get food, where to work, and so forth. Fieldworkers have to learn these things also, but they are not primary. Fieldwork has an ethnographic purpose as its focus, and, therefore, you must always maintain an ethnographic mindset, even if that mindset is not always front and center.

The purpose of fieldwork is to gather data to write ethnography. Therefore, you are “in the field” whenever you are gathering ethnographic data. The “field” is not a place, it is an attitude (or group of attitudes), or what we can call a mindset. The best way to establish this point is to think of a variety of people who are gathering data and what their purposes are: detective, tourist, journalist, and fieldworker. They are all concerned with useful data, but what can be considered “useful” is determined by the purposes for which the data are gathered, and how they will be used subsequently.

So, what is an ethnographic mindset? There is no easy answer to that question, and the exercises in this book provide a hands-on approach to grasping what it is that fieldworkers do. It is not one thing. Sometimes they observe, sometimes they engage, sometimes they participate, sometimes they take action. Sometimes they take notes, or make voice recordings, or take photographs, or make videos, or draw maps, or play computer games, or combinations of all of these and more. After you have done some of the exercises here we can return to the question, and I have some additional thoughts in my concluding chapter. Meanwhile, you can keep the salient question in the back of your mind, “What am I seeking to achieve?” Fieldwork is never a passive enterprise; it must always be actively reflective and reflexive (at some level).

Likewise, instruction in fieldwork can also be reflexive. This book is a fair example in places. In many projects I introduce instructions and suggestions in a reflexive manner. That is, I reflect on the kinds of practices that worked well in my classes, and also on what I might have done to improve them. This practice developed out of my general desire to see teaching as a partnership with my students. When I was a classroom lecturer, there came a point in most classes when I would talk directly about my life, beginning with the observation that I had a life outside the classroom. I told my students that I had a wife and son, I owned a house, had bills to pay, had heartaches and joys, just like everyone else. I did not just magically appear for 90 minutes twice a week, dispense objective information, and then disappear into some nameless void. In that sense, teaching anthropology is not like teaching chemistry (not for me, at least). I have taught chemistry without injecting myself into my lessons; I have never taught anthropology that way.

My students often used the expression “the real world” to describe life outside the university, and I frequently pointed out to them that the expression implied that the university was not real. It is real. It is part of the world. You can talk about the office world or the factory world or the university world, but one is not more or less real than any other. They all have their rules and they all have their rewards and punishments. What matters is how well you know the rules (which is one of the issues to be delved ethnographically). I am embedded in many chapters in this book to show you how I derived my methods, and you (and your instructor) are free to question them, and alter them, instead of treating them as absolute instructions to be obeyed without demur. What I do works for me (usually); it may not work for you. All I can do is tell you why my methods work for me. That is why the book is (minimally) reflexive.

This is a book about learning how to do fieldwork and how to present your findings to your instructor or some other relatively self-contained, or private, audience. You are not being asked to create a polished finished product to be widely disseminated. That enterprise is a step beyond what is required of you here. Organizing your field data and presenting it to your instructor is an intermediate step between gathering the data in the first place, and honing it into professional-level output. That final step is not within the purview of this book. If you have an interest in pursuing this subject more, specifically as it relates to both the gathering of data and the conversion of data to output for public consumption, you can consult the anthology, Fieldnotes, The Makings of Anthropology edited by Roger Sanjek (1990) or Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes by Robert Emerson et al. (2011). The latter book is primarily concerned with how you go about taking notes during fieldwork and should also be consulted in this regard, because the process is not as obvious as may seem at first, and there are many wrinkles that you may not have thought of. Although in its second edition, the book is somewhat dated given the technologies now available to fieldworkers. When I present the individual projects in this book, I give different strategies for note taking depending on the nature of the project.

Individual projects in this book offer a wide array of methods for presenting your data including standard written reports, PowerPoint slide shows, videos, blogs, and so on, and which one you choose will depend on the parameters of the project, your instructor’s requirements, and your own preferences.